Pondering the puzzle of far too many zombie economists, many of European, English, and American fresh-water origin, I started researching how to REALLY kill a zombie.

The recent tragic British recessionary news motivates this research. Britain receded into a recession in the fourth quarter, making the current depression the longest even considering the prior depression. This NIESR chart is from Jonathan Portes, Director, National Institute of Economic and Social Research, previously, Chief Economist at the UK Cabinet Office. Notice that, in Britain, this depression is also almost as deep as the prior one.

Menzie Chinn, of the University of Wisconsin, Madison, also weighs in with his view which highlights the drastic difference that zombie-supporting political ideologues make in the affairs of nations. Here is his chart:

And Chris Dillow, via Mark Thoma, both have the same question I do (minus the zombie part).

So, I feel I am on solid ground in my quest. The best reference so far for kil…

﻿This volume, a collection of essays by internationally known experts in the area of the history of economic thought and of the economics of Keynes and macroeconomics in particular, is designed to celebrate the 75th anniversary of the publication of The General Theory.

The essays contained in this volume are divided into four sections. The first section contains three essays that explore the concept of fundamental uncertainty and its unique role in The General Theory. The second section contains five essays that examine the place of The General Theory in the history of macroeconomics since 1936. The third section contains three essays that explore the interrelationships among Keynes, Friedman, Kaldor, Marx and Sraffa and their approaches to macroeconomic theory and policy. The final section contains four essays that provide several new interpretations of The General Theory and its position within macroeconomics.

The concept of vulgar economics, developed by Karl Marx, is often cited, but seldom properly used or understood. In the preface to the second German edition to Capital Marx said that:
"[The] period, from 1820 to 1830, was notable in England for scientific activity in the domain of Political Economy. It was the time as well of the vulgarising and extending of Ricardo’s theory, as of the contest of that theory with the old school."
It is important to note that Marx clearly knew that "the theory of Ricardo already serves, in exceptional cases, as a weapon of attack upon bourgeois economy," in particular, because Ricardo was the first to show conclusively the necessary oposition between wages and profits, and the conflictive nature of the capitalist system. The problem with post-Ricardian economics was that it could not claim to be scientific and at the same time argue that the capitalist system was harmonious. For him:
"Men who still claimed some scientific stand…

The so-called Great Gatsby diagram that Alan Krueger presented recently shows that there is a positive correlation between inequality and lack of social mobility. The graph below shows a full version.
Note that the only African and the four Latin American countries are on the higher end of the graph, while the four Nordic and the three British off-shoots in the sample are at the other end of the Gatsby curve. The US uncomfortably close to the higher end of the curve. No particular observation. Graph does all the job. The source for the graph is Miles Corak here.

Teaching the basics of the surplus approach this week. One important feature of what Garegnani refers to as the core of the surplus approach, shown in the figure below, is the flexibility that it provides for the development of alternative theories.

In the core output, technology and real wages are taken as data of the system. With output and technology one can determine the labor requirements for production. Further, with real wages one can get the necessary consumption needed to reproduce the labor force. Finally, extracting necessary consumption from output one obtains the surplus, and the surplus is what allows for expanded reproduction or accumulation, the main preoccupation of classical political economy authors.

An important thing to emphasize is that the relations within the core do not imply that the theories regarding the data must be similar. For example, while Ricardo accepted Say's Law, Marx clearly rejected it. Hence, the core is compatible with alternative theories …

Published originally in portuguese in the Folha de S. Paulo, January 16, 2012

In his last column, Martin Wolf mentioned the fact that, since 2007, the fast-growing Asian countries have grown by 60%, whereas rich countries have grown by 3%, and he pinned the world's economic hopes in Asia. Brazil, in the same period, grew by modest 16%. Brazilians also depend on the increase in Asian demand to achieve their growth. Brazilian economy is not stagnant as the economy of developed countries, but, in terms of growth, it is closer to them than to countries such as China and India.

A few readings on why American hegemony is not on the verge of collapse, prompted by a conversation with a graduate student. Note that all come from a group of people that has been influenced by Maria da Conceição Tavares, who wrote in 1985 a classic paper (A Retomada da Hegemonia Norte-Americana; in portuguese), on the rise of US hegemony when almost everybody was going in the other direction.

It is well known that the surplus approach authors dealt with exhaustible resources when discussing land and rent. The so-called Ricardian theory of rent, discovered by West and Malthus, has important implications for income distribution as it is well known. Landlords benefited from protection, which forced the use of scarce land, and led to higher rents (and for a given output and a fixed wage at subsistence) and lower profits. Thus, the existence of an exhaustible resource led to a transfer from the dynamic capitalists to the backward landlords.

The rent paid for the extensive use of land of different quality is significantly different than the intensive case of marginalist (neoclassical) theory. Marx was critical of certain aspects of the Ricardian theory of rent. In particular, he argued that 'absolute rent' would arise even if there were no differences in the levels of land productivity, if owners had a monopoly power over the natural resource. In this sense, the nature …

Robert Barro, the cheerleader of dollarization and common currencies, has finally come out of the closet. No, not in that way; he just came out against the euro in his Wall Street Journal column (subscription required). He says:
"The euro was a noble experiment, but it has failed. Instead of wasting more money on expanding the system's scope and developing ever larger rescue funds, it would be better for the EU and others to think about how best to revert to a system of individual currencies."
The interesting thing is that he wants to discard the euro for all the wrong reasons. In his view, the problem is fiscal, and what the new national currencies would allow is for 'credible' fiscal adjustments. Again, in his own words:
"Worries about values of government bonds are rational because it is unclear whether—even with assistance from the center—Italy and other weak members will be able and willing to meet their long-term euro obligations. A new (or restored) s…

New paper at the Levy Economics Institute. From the abstract:
Conventional wisdom suggests that the European debt crisis, which has thus far led to severe adjustment programs crafted by the European Union and the International Monetary Fund in both Greece and Ireland, was caused by fiscal profligacy on the part of peripheral, or noncore, countries in combination with a welfare state model, and that the role of the common currency—the euro—was at best minimal.This paper aims to show that, contrary to conventional wisdom, the crisis in Europe is the result of an imbalance between core and noncore countries that is inherent in the euro economic model. Underpinned by a process of monetary unification and financial deregulation, core eurozone countries pursued export-led growth policies—or, more specifically, “beggar thy neighbor” policies—at the expense of mounting disequilibria and debt accumulation in the periphery. This imbalance became unsustainable, and this unsustainability was a ca…

The center of gravity on climate change/global warming/... on the left is pretty fairly represented by Dean Baker's recent blog saying it's lights out figuratively and literally if we don't change our profligate energy ways. And this is by far more important inter-generationally than the current aggregate-demand-deficit-led fiscal deficits. Dean's post is here.

And, given mainstream science, he's absolutely right. This leads to the growth-neutral advocates with whom I have a moral problem in that it condemns the poorer nations to less wealth than we living in advanced countries enjoy. If that is to be the outcome, we should be crystal clear sure of our environmental arguments. I do not challenge results like those from the IPCC.

However, there are a couple of mitigating things going on, one in the realm of economics, and one in the realm of heterodox science.

First, for a recent department seminar on environment, I put together some data using the Kaya model and UN po…

It has become increasingly common to suggest that on top of the European debacle and the sluggish recovery in the United States, China might be on the verge of a collapse, and with it the last bastion of economic growth in the world economy would also be gone. Not only the center is stagnant, but also the periphery of the global economy is very fragile. But the probability of a Chinese slowdown is greatly exaggerated.

Paul Krugman, who has been correct about the need for fiscal expansion in the United States, and about the European Central Bank (ECB) mismanagement of the Greek crisis, for example, has suggested that China is in the middle of a housing bubble that can burst at any time (see also Jayati Ghosh and C. P. Chandrasekhar here for a similar, but broader view of the dangers in 2012). This view insinuates that growth in China is fundamentally dependent on domestic demand, but that the sources of the expansion are fragile. It, further, suggests that China now looks very similar t…

There are Gold Bugs and there are Bitcoin Bugs. They all oppose fiat money (hate the Fed and other monetary authorities) and follow some sort of free banking view loosely based on Austrian views. The supply of bitcoins is strictly exogenous controlled by a complex system that cannot be trampled by greedy central bankers and politicians. Wired said in an article last year that:
"Bitcoin required no faith in the politicians or financiers who had wrecked the economy—just in Nakamoto’s elegant algorithms. Not only did bitcoin’s public ledger seem to protect against fraud, but the predetermined release of the digital currency kept the bitcoin money supply growing at a predictable rate, immune to printing-press-happy central bankers and Weimar Republic-style hyperinflation."
A very monetarist view of inflation, as you can see. The problem is that central banks print too much money, and by the way, in the US hyperinflation is around the corner.